Kenji Goto

Kenji Goto (1967-31 January 2015) was a Japanese freelance journalist who was captured and beheaded by the Islamic State while searching for his friend Haruna Yukawa in Syria.

Biography
Kenji Goto was born in 1967 in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Hosei University in Tokyo in 1991 and established Independent Press in 1996 after working for a media production company. He later worked for UNICEF and other United Nations organizations, and he reported on child soldiers and blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, the survivors of the Rwandan Civil War, a teenage mother in an AIDS-stricken village in Estonia, and young girls' education in Afghanistan.

In October 2014, he entered Syria through Turkey to rescue Japanese citizen Haruna Yukawa, who was captured by the Islamic State while attempting to found a private military company to fight in the Syrian Civil War. He was captured in December, and the Islamic State asked Japan to pay $200,000,000 in exchange for the release of the two hostages. Japan refused, and on 24 January Haruna Yukawa was beheaded. Kenji Goto appeared in a video where he stated that the Islamic State would exchange him for Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, an imprisoned Jordanian attempted suicide bomber. Again, Japan did nothing to help the terrorists, and Kenji Goto was beheaded on 31 January 2015.